Educational Renaissance

Revamping education by integrating traditional & contemporary knowledge as well as making it accessible to all sections of society by utilizing the modern means is a colossal task. First & foremost it entails a brief understanding of the factors of educational decline in our community. The traditional seminaries inspite of being vast reservoirs of knowledge & experience gained over several centuries are far from being the trend-setters for the society that they are supposed to be. They are unable to connect with the peculiar circumstances of the modern world due to a rigid obsession of only following an archaic methodology.

Besides, the gradual ideological indoctrination, materialistic orientation, ignorance of traditional wisdom, lack of adab, ambiguity of vision, vague educational framework, commodification of education, educational apartheid, institutional mismanagement, educational red tape, clerical mindsets, incoherent thinking & inefficient functioning are some of the major contributors towards the degeneration of education in the modern schools/colleges. Furthermore, the problem is compounded due to the lack of competent personnel, compartmentalization of knowledge, industrialization of education to primarily serve the corporates, rote learning, lack of critical research, stagnation of creativity, lack of reflective thinking, incoherence of educational activities and skewed evaluation, along with alienation from the Quran, moral decadence, the insignificance of value education, as well as the adverse impact of multi-media on focused ingenuity.
Yet, there certainly is light at the end of the tunnel. There is a palpable universal sentiment of integrating the two streams of knowledge among the intellectuals of our community. However, an attempt to bridge the gap between the secular-educated world and the world of the Ulama necessitates research into the contemporary social, economic, political, scientific and historical discourse & the development of an integrated, compatible and complementary paradigm of education. A scholastic methodology should be developed that would maintain the sanctity of traditional learning while being in sync with contemporary subjects. An educational paradigm that will combine empirical material knowledge obtained from sense perceptions & analysis, with the revealed knowledge obtained from divine revelation & prophetic traditions expounded by the wisdom & insight of esteemed scholars.